It's one of the stories that could tilt today’s gubernatorial election in Virginia. The rapes that occurred in the school district in Loudoun County have become national news. It would have been news eons ago if it weren’t for political bias, but you all know that. A 14-year-old girl was raped in the bathroom in May by a gender fluid student. That student was not charged and then allowed to attend a different school, only to attack another student there. It also seems like the school board covered up the incident. It’s led to students walking out, angered that they were never told of a predator in their midst. Regarding the first attack, a judge recently ruled there was sufficient evidence to conclude that a sexual assault occurred. Yet, the first student was said to have had previous consensual sexual contact with the accused gender-fluid attacker, so that means she was asking for it, right? No, but a recent New York Times op-ed that seeks to clarify what’s going on in Northern Virginia seems to really play into the victim-blaming trope. And I thought the Left said we needed to believe all women, right:
On June 22, a middle-aged plumber named Scott Smith was dragged, lip bleeding and hands cuffed behind his back, from a raucous school board meeting in Loudoun County, Va. According to the local newspaper Loudoun Now, he’d been swearing loudly at another parent and leaning toward her with a clenched fist when the police tackled him and pulled him outside. He’d eventually be convicted of disorderly conduct and resisting arrest and given a suspended 10-day jail sentence.
Smith’s image quickly went viral as a symbol of the sort of school board strife breaking out all over America. The National School Boards Association, writing to President Biden to request help dealing with the “growing number of threats of violence and acts of intimidation” directed at school board members, included Smith’s arrest in a list of examples.
Soon, however, Smith revealed why he’d been so distraught. In an interview with The Daily Wire, a website co-founded by the conservative wunderkind Ben Shapiro, Smith said that his ninth-grade daughter had been sexually assaulted in a school bathroom by a boy wearing a skirt. Smith was opposed to a proposed policy allowing trans kids to use bathrooms aligned with their gender identities, believing it made girls like his daughter vulnerable.
[…]
Not surprisingly, the story ricocheted around the right. Conservatives have long argued that letting trans girls and women into women’s bathrooms would lead to sexual predation, and now that seemed to have happened. They’ve argued that wokeness is a form of tyranny, and in Smith they had a man who seemed to have been tyrannized because his family’s lived experience posed a threat to trans ideology.
If they had it all wrong, it’s almost hard to blame them — the narrative was too irresistible.
[…]
But this week, during a juvenile court hearing, a fuller picture of Smith’s daughter’s ordeal emerged. She suffered something atrocious. It had nothing at all to do, however, with trans bathroom policies. Instead, like many women and girls, she was a victim of relationship violence.
Smith’s daughter testified that she’d previously had two consensual sexual encounters with her attacker in the school bathroom. On the day of her assault, they’d agreed to meet up again. “The evidence was that the girl chose that bathroom, but her intent was to talk to him, not to engage in sexual relations,” Biberaj, whose office prosecuted the case, told me. The boy, however, expected sex and refused to accept the girl’s refusal. As the The Washington Post reported, she testified, “He flipped me over. I was on the ground and couldn’t move and he sexually assaulted me.”
The boy was indeed wearing a skirt, but that skirt didn’t authorize him to use the girls’ bathroom. As Amanda Terkel reported in HuffPost, the school district’s trans-inclusive bathroom policies were approved only in August, more than two months after the assault. This was not, said Biberaj, someone “identifying as transgender and going into the girls’ bathroom under the guise of that.”
On Monday, the boy received the juvenile court equivalent of a guilty verdict. The case dealing with the second attack he is accused of will be decided in November.
[…]
Even as the facts of this case have come out, the damage done by all the disinformation about it will be hard to undo. “Once the politics are over, we’re still dealing with the destruction,” said Biberaj, who wonders how her community is supposed to heal. “You can’t always successfully bring people back to say, ‘I know this is what you were told, but look what happened in court under oath.’”
A sad and complicated truth is probably no match for an exquisitely useful lie.
The New York Times: “Who Blames the Victim?”
— Chrissy Clark (@chrissyclark_) October 29, 2021
Also the NYTimes: The LCPS rape case happened because the two had consensual relations in the past — this is part of the right’s “big lie” pic.twitter.com/gOxzlmkEkY
holy shit, new york times. pic.twitter.com/FukPfsZr0o
— tsar becket adams (@BecketAdams) October 29, 2021
"yeah, the boy raped one girl in a bathroom and sexually assaulted another girl, and the school board covered it up and lied about it during a hearing on transgender policies ... but, like, the first case, the one with forcible sodomy, was just a relationship gone bad. BIG LIE."
— tsar becket adams (@BecketAdams) October 29, 2021
"the story of the first girl's rape, and all the lying and covering up that went with it, isn't as bad as they say it is. you see, she wanted it previously...."
— tsar becket adams (@BecketAdams) October 29, 2021
that's just one hell of a fucking argument.
anyway, in case you've ever wondered how things such as church sex abuse go unchecked by even the people who know about it, consider this michelle goldberg op-ed. you play for a team long enough, you get used to a certain reflexive loyalty, even when it means you're the evil one.
— tsar becket adams (@BecketAdams) October 29, 2021
The piece is titled “The Right’s Big Lie About a Sexual Assault in Virginia.” Where’s the lie? The girl was raped. The judge ruled that it occurred. It’s written in the piece, but the two previous consensual sexual encounters make this a…non-rape? This is classic narrative protecting. The rape doesn’t matter. It’s about ensuring transgender or inclusive bathroom policies are not targeted. Screw the girl, right?
This is a rather lengthy piece that pretty much voices frustration that liberals got caught being morons about sexual assault policy and the overall curriculum in schools. The sexual assault incident doesn’t help matters concerning narrative maintenance. The board seems to have covered it up and there’s no pivot, except for seemingly insinuating that because this girl had past consensual contact—she wasn’t really raped. That’s appalling, but par for the course for The New York Times. We all remember Gloria Steinem’s op-ed that absolved Bill Clinton of all past sexual assault and misconduct allegations because he was liberal, a Democrat, and pro-abortion.
It’s no different here.
What's rich is that we're the ones peddling a false narrative. No. It's the liberal media that's trying to gloss over the rapes. We're telling the truth. These are the facts. Even now, the elite media cannot write about sexual assault in a way that's either accurate or with sensitivity.
